White Doves at Morning: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (10 page)

"You get enough to eat?" Jim said to him.

"Pert' near as much as I want," the boy replied.

"Then I guess we'd better throw away this mush and bacon here," Jim said.

"Hit don't matter to me," the little boy said, his face as smooth and expressionless as clay in the light from the fire.

"Come over here and bring your pan," Jim said.

The boy dusted off the seat of his pants and sat on a stump by Willie. He watched while Willie filled his pan, then he ate the mush with a spoon, his thumb and index finger all the way up the handle, scraping the food directly into his mouth.

"What's your name?" Willie asked.

"Tige McGuffy," the boy said.

"How old might you be, Tige?" Willie asked.

"Eleven, pert' near twelve," the boy said.

"Well, we're mighty pleased to meet you, Tige McGuffy," Willie said.

"This mush with bacon is a treat. I ain't never quite had it prepared like that," Tige said. "How come you was puking out in the trees?"

"Don't rightly know, Tige," Willie said, and for the first time that day he laughed.

Out on the edge of the firelight the musicians sang,

"White doves come at morning
Where my soldier sleeps in the ground.
I placed my ring in his coffin,
The trees o'er his grave have all turned brown."

Jim stood up and flung a pine cone at them.

"Put a stop to that kind of song!" he yelled.

As the campfires died in the clearing, Jim and Willie took their blankets out in the trees and drank the half-pint of whiskey Jim had bought off a Tennessee rifleman.

Jim made a pillow by wrapping his shoes in his haversack, then lay back in his blankets, gazing up at the sky.

"A touch of the giant-killer sure makes a fellow's prospects seem brighter, doesn't it?" he said.

Willie drew his blanket up to his shoulders and propped his head on his arm.

"Wonder how a little fellow like Tige ends up here," he said.

"He'll get through it. We'll all be fine. Those Yankees better be afraid of us, that's all I can say," Jim said.

"Think so?" Willie said.

Jim drank the last ounce in the whiskey bottle. "Absolutely," he replied."Good night, Willie."

"Good night, Jim."

They went to sleep, their bodies warm with alcohol, with dogwood and redbud trees in bloom at their heads and feet, the black sky now dotted with stars.

Chapter Seven

THEY woke the next morning to sunlight that was like glass needles through the trees and the sounds of men and horses running, wagons banging over the ruts out on the Corinth Road, tin pots spilling out of the back of a mobile field kitchen.

They heard a single rifle shot in the distance, then a spatter of small-arms fire that was like strings of Chinese firecrackers exploding. They jumped from their blankets and ran back to the clearing where they had cooked their food and stacked their Enfields the previous night. The air was cinnamon-colored with dust and leaves that had been powdered by running feet. Their Enfields and haversacks lay abandoned on the ground.

The men from the 6th Mississippi were already moving northward through the trees, their bayonets fixed. Tige McGuffy was strapping his drum around his neck, his hands shaking.

"What happened to the 18th Lou'sana?" Jim said.

"Them Frenchies you come in with?" Tige said.

 "Yes, where did they go?" Willie asked, his heart tripping.

 "West, toward Owl Creek. A kunnel on horseback come in before dawn and moved them out. Where'd y'all go to?" Tige replied.

Willie and Jim looked at each other.

"I think we're seriously in the shitter," Jim said.

"How far is this Owl Creek?" Willie said.

Before Tige could answer a cannon shell arced out of the sky and exploded over the canopy. Pieces of hot metal whistled through the leaves and lay smoking on the ground. Tige hitched up his drum, a drumstick in each hand, and ran to join his comrades.

"Let's go, Jim. They're going to put us down as deserters for sure," Willie said.

Jim went back into the trees and retrieved their blankets while Willie repacked their haversacks. They started through the hardwoods in a westerly direction and ran right into a platoon of Tennessee infantry, jogging by twos, their rifle barrels canted at an upward angle, a redheaded, barrel-chested sergeant, with sweat rings under his arms, wheezing for breath at their side.

"Where might you two fuckers think you're going?" he said.

"You sound like you're from Erin, sir," Willie said.

"Shut your 'ole and fall in behind me," the sergeant said.

"We're with the 18th Lou'sana," Jim said.

"You're with me or you'll shortly join the heavenly choir. Which would you prefer, lad?" the sergeant said, raising the barrel of his carbine.

Within minutes men in gray and butternut were streaming from every direction toward a focal point where other soldiers were furiously digging rifle pits and wheeling cannon into position. Through the hardwoods Willie thought he saw the pink bloom of a peach orchard and the movements of blue-clad men inside it.

The small-arms fire was louder now, denser, the rifle reports no longer muted by distance, and he could see puffs of rifle smoke exploding out of the trees. A toppling minie ball went past his ear with a whirring sound, like a clock spring winding down, smacking against a sycamore behind his head.

Up ahead, a Confederate colonel, the Bonnie Blue flag tied to the blade of his sword, stood on the edge of the trees, his body auraed with sunlight and smoke, shouting, "Form it up, boys! Form it up! Stay on my back! Stay on my back! Forward, harch!"

There seemed to be no plan to what they were doing, Willie thought. A skirmish line had moved out into the sunlight, into the drifting smoke, then the line broke apart and became little more than a mob running at the peach orchard, yelling in unison, "Woo, woo, woo," their bayonets pointed like spears.

Willie could not believe he was following them. He wasn't supposed to be here, he told himself. His commanding officer was the chivalric Colonel Alfred Mouton, not some madman with a South Carolinian flag tied to his sword. Willie fumbled his bayonet out of its scabbard and paused behind a tree to twist it into place on the barrel of his Enfield.

The redheaded sergeant hit him in the back with his fist. "Move your ass!" the sergeant said.

Out in the sunlight Willie saw a cannonball skip along the ground like a jackrabbit, take off a man's leg at the thigh, bounce once, and cut another man in half.

The sergeant hit him again, then knotted his shirt behind the neck and shoved him forward. Suddenly Willie was in the sunlight, the sweat on his face like ice water, the peach orchard blooming with puffs of smoke. "Where was Jim?"

The initial skirmish line wilted and crumpled in a withering volley from the orchard. A second line of men advanced behind the first, and, from a standing position, aimed and fired into the pink flowers drifting down from the peach trees. Willie heard the Irish sergeant wheezing, gasping for breath behind him. He waited for another fist in the middle of his back.

But when he turned he saw the sergeant standing motionless in the smoke, his mouth puckered like a fish's, a bright hole in his throat leaking down his shirt, his carbine slipping from his hand. "Get down, Willie!" he heard Jim shout behind him. Jim knocked him flat just as a wheeled Yankee cannon, in the middle of a sunken road, roared back on its carriage and blew a bucket of grapeshot into the Confederate line.

Men in butternut and gray fell like cornstalks cut with a scythe. The colonel who had carried the Bonnie Blue flag lay dead in the grass, his sword stuck at a silly angle in the soft earth. Some tried to kneel and reload, but a battery none of them could see rained exploding shells in their midst, blowing fountains of dirt and parts of men in the air. Many of those fleeing over the bodies of their comrades for the protection of the woods were vectored in a crossfire by sharpshooters rising from the pits on the far side ol the sunken road.
Then there was silence, and in the silence Willie thought he heard someone beating a broken cadence on a drumhead, like a fool who does not know a Mardi Gras parade has come to an end.

THROUGH the morning and afternoon thousands of men moved in and out of the trees, stepping through the dead who flanged the edge of the woods or lay scattered across the breadth of the clearing. Columns of sunlight tunneled through the smoke inside the woods, and the air smelled of cordite, horse manure, trees set on fire from fused shells, and humus cratered out of the forest floor. Willie had lost his haversack, cartridge box, the scabbard for his bayonet, and his canteen, but he didn't know where or remember how. He had pulled a cartridge pouch off the belt of a dead man who had already been stripped of his shirt and shoes. Then he had found another dead man in a ravine, with his canteen still hung from his neck, and had pulled the cloth strap loose from the man's head and uncorked the canteen only to discover it was filled with corn whiskey.

He had never been so thirsty in his life. His lips and tongue were black from biting off the ends of cartridge papers, his nostrils clotted with dust and bits of desiccated leaves. He watched a sergeant use his canteen to wash the blood from a wounded man's face and he wanted to tear the canteen from the sergeant's hands and pour every ounce of its contents down his own throat.

Jim's canteen had been split in half by a minie ball early in the morning, and neither of them had eaten or drunk a teaspoon of water since the previous night. They had collapsed behind a thick-trunked white oak, exhausted, light-headed, their ears ringing, waiting for the group of Tennessee infantry, to which they now belonged through no volition of their own, to re-form and once again move on the sunken road that the Southerners were now calling the Hornets' Nest.

The leaves on the floor of the forest were streaked with the blood of the wounded who had been dragged back to the ambulance wagons in the rear. Some men had talked about a surgeon's tent, back near the Corinth Road, that buzzed with green flies and contained cries that would live in a man's dreams the rest of his life.

Looking to the
south, Willie could see horses pulling more cannons through the trees, twenty-four-pounders as high as a man, the spoked wheels knocking across rocks and logs. He pointed and told Jim to look at the cannons that were lumbering on their carriages through the hardwoods, then realized he could not hear.

He pressed his thumbs under his ears and swallowed and tried to force air through his ear passages, but it was to no avail. The rest of the world was going about its business, and he was viewing it as though he were trapped under a glass bell.

The cannons went past him, silently, through the leaves and scarred tree trunks, lumbering toward the peach orchard and the sunken road, as silently as if their wheels had been wrapped with flannel. He lay back against the trunk of the white oak and shut his eyes, more tired than he had ever been, convinced he could sleep through the Apocalypse. He could feel a puff of breeze on his cheek, smell water in a creek, hear his mother making breakfast in the boardinghouse kitchen at dawn's first light.

Then he heard a sound, like a series of doors slamming. He jerked his head up. Jim was standing above him, his lips moving, his consternation showing.

"What?" Willie said.

Jim's lips were moving silently, then audible words came from his mouth in mid-sentence.

"—got us some water. That fellow from the 6th Mis'sippi we were talking to last night, the one who looked like he got hit across the face with a frying pan, he toted a whole barrel up here strapped to his back," Jim said.

He squatted down with a tin cup and handed it to Willie.

"Where's yours?" Willie asked.

"I had plenty. Drink up," Jim said, his eyes sliding off Willie's face.

There was a black smear of gunpowder on the cup's rim where Jim had drunk, but the water level in the cup was down only an inch. Willie drank two swallows, a little more than half the remaining water, and returned the cup to Jim.

"Finish it up, you ole beanpole, and don't be lying to your pal again," Willie said.

Jim sat down against the tree bark.

"You hit any of them today?" he asked.

"I couldn't see through the smoke most of the time, you?" Willie replied.

"Maybe. I saw a fellow behind a rick fence go down. A ball hit him in the face," Jim said. He looked into space, his jaw flexing. "I was glad."

Willie turned and looked at Jim's profile, a gunpowder burn on his right cheek, the bitter cast in his eye.

"They're no different from us, Jim," he said.

"Yes, they are. They're down here. We didn't go up there."

A young lieutenant strolled through the enlisted men sitting on the ground. He wore a goatee that looked like corn silk, and a wide-brimmed cavalry officer's hat, with a gold cord strung around the crown, a bared sword carried casually on his shoulder. Blood had drained from inside his coat onto the leather flap of his pistol holster.

"Our cannoneers are about to start banging doors again, gentlemen. Then we're going to have another run at it," he said.

"We been out there eleven times, suh," a private on the ground said.

"Twelve's a charm. Stuff your fingers in your ears," the lieutenant said, just as over twenty cannons fired in sequence, almost point-blank, into the sunken road and the woods beyond.

Then the cannon crews began to fire at will, the barrels and gun carriages lurching off the ground, the crews turning in a half-crouch from the explosion, their hands clamped over their ears. They swabbed out the barrels, then reloaded with more caseshot, canister, and grape. They snipped the fuses on explosive shells so they detonated as airbursts immediately on the other side of the sunken road. When they ran short of conventional ordnance, they loaded with lengths of chain, chopped-up horseshoes, chunks of angle iron and buckets of railroad spikes.

Through the smoke Willie and Jim could see bits of trees flying in the air, the staff of an American flag lopped in half, blue-clad men climbing out of their rifle pits, running for the rear, sometimes with a wounded comrade supported between them.